Catalog

Mercy

MERCY, the last in the series, is encyclopedic ephemera, exploring public visions of technological and romantic invention, dissecting the game mass media plays with our private perceptions.

"Detournments, deviations, disruptions, allures. Can aggression be sumptuous? These films are volatile and they have bite. Here the subliminal cannot caress, it comes out with its hands up, the smile wiped from its face. The accelerated velocity of these films doesn't create an alternate camouflage. At this speed viewer passivity is unsafe and active viewing is a necessary pleasure. We are provoked to get up to speed, to be resourceful, dance, break step. These films put a spin on things. Shift the coordinates. The peripheries relocate to the core drawn by the centrifugal force of the editing. Posing a threat to threatening poses these frictions erupt with new clarity." - Mark McElhatten

"You could say the sound plays the part of the page, the way its field excites the eye turning the meanings of the word sounds make (polyphonic) or that it is modelled after the mind's divergent attention (jumpy overlaps) or perhaps that the relation of sound to image is prepositional, is a repositioning. To sever the connections which have become scar tissue" (Child, This Is Called Moving,198-199).